Digital binary data stored on hard drives consists essentially of a series or so called binary bits or ‘strings’ of magnetic domains on the storage medium with specific polarities corresponding to the positive and negative voltages the hard drive applies to the write head. Each such signal constitutes an individual magnetic impulse. The magnetic flux reversals from the boundaries between the areas of positive and negative polarity that the drive controller uses to encode the digital data onto the analog recording medium. During a read operation, each flux reversal the drive detects, generates a positive or negative pulse that the device uses to reconstruct the original binary data. A single ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) character, be it a letter, numeral, symbol or control character can be converted into binary consisting of eight or more binary ‘bits’ of such data.
Storage of such digital data has for many years been carried out by simply recording each string of magnetic impulses, on a magnetic medium. In many cases this medium is a disc coated with ferromagnetic material. Such discs have been used as so called ‘floppy discs’, and more advanced discs are used in so called ‘hard drives’. The disc spins at a high speed. A recording head records the impulses, for storing the data on the disc. Retrieval is made by a read head which reads the impulses, when it is required to retrieve the data. Such disc drives have for some time been subject to finite limits in the amount of data that can be stored in this way, due to the difficulty in resolving increasingly smaller polarized magnetic zones.
However the increasing complexity of programs and applications, require ever increasing storage capacity. Hard drives are now reaching the upper limits of storage density due to the limited quantity of magnetic flux reversals available per inch squared on the recording medium. Multiple hard drives are common in enterprise and cloud operations. Hard drives with ultra high speeds and high densities are available. Hard drive stored data is also susceptible to electro-magnetic flux interference from many electromagnetic sources which can damage the stored data making it unreadable. Hard drives are notoriously unreliable and have necessitated additional industries to account for their failure prone operation.
None of the improvements can keep pace with demands for more and more storage capacity. The pace of hard drive capacity development has not kept up with the pace of microprocessor development.
Another problem is that as the sheer size of the hard drive, or drives, increases, the speed of recording and retrieval must inevitably be reduced. One basic problem with storing digital data is the magnetic impulses in which the data is encoded.
In hard disk drives, each circular track is divided into physical sectors made up of three basic parts: the sector header, the data area and the error-correcting code (ECC). In the data area, a sequence of eight magnetic bits or impulses is used to represent for example in ASCII character. It is apparent that any storage system based on storing the strings of binary data bits as magnetic impulses, is not going to satisfy the needs both for more storage and also improving recording and retrieval speeds.
Preferably any such data storage system will have a physical “footprint” which is more or less the same as that of the known types of hard drive.
Preferably such a system will use technology which exists, albeit in other applications, rather than requiring extensive experimentation and research into some entirely new and experimental field of technology, which may take many years to investigate and design into a practicable form, which would be capable of being made and sold and serviced, by existing technicians.